Infinite Mana In The Apocalypse novel Chapter 5243

Chapter 5243: THE Source Lands! II

Most beings do not know what their source is.

A being who has been cultivating for eons, accumulating Civilizations and Causes and engineered Egos and layers of authority built atop layers of authority, cannot easily identify which part of themselves is the substrate and which part is the accumulation, because the accumulation has been present long enough that removing it conceptually feels like removing the self rather than revealing it.

Two schools of thought have emerged from this problem across the long history of beings who cared enough to argue about it.

The first school holds that the source is pure potential, the thing you were before any specific shape was imposed on you by experience or cultivation or circumstance. To return to your source, in this view, is to return to unblemished readiness, a state prior to attachment, prior to identity, prior to the narrowing that happened when you chose this path and not another.

This school finds the source to be a kind of perfection, the best version of what you could have been before you became the specific version of what you are. Returning to it is a gift. A homecoming. The place from which all possibilities remain open because none have yet been chosen.

The second school disagrees.

The second school holds that what you find when you strip away all accumulation is not potential but essence, and essence is not perfect, it is simply true. The source is not the best version of what you could have been. It is the irreducible thing that remains when everything chosen and everything built and everything borrowed has been removed. It is what you are when nothing is helping you.

And for many beings, the second school argues, that irreducible thing is small. It is frightened. It has been hiding inside the accumulation for precisely as long as the accumulation has existed, relieved that the accumulation was there to stand in front of it.

The first school says returning to your source is enlightenment.

The second school says returning to your source is the moment you find out whether there was anything there to return to.

Both schools agree on one thing: the process of returning is not comfortable. Whatever the source turns out to be, it does not want to be found. It has been covered for a reason.

---

The Wall took everything.

The moment Noah’s hand made contact with THE Advent Wall, the stripping commenced with the sudden comprehensiveness of a process that had been waiting for the contact to authorize it. His Hadean Pillar of Infinity, his bones and organs, his Apeiron engineering, his scales and horns and tail, his accumulated Civilizations, his Hadean Organ and the Absolute Forge within it... all of it departed with the finality of weight being removed from a surface that had been bearing it, each component of his external existence pulled away in a single continuous motion rather than a series of individual removals.

It did not hurt.

That was the first thing that was unexpected. He had anticipated damage. What he experienced instead was reduction, the sensation of a being discovering how much of themselves they had been carrying without noticing the carrying.

Then the chaotic obsidian Infinity hit.

The space inside THE Advent Wall was not space in the sense that the domains he had moved through previously were space. It existed as a continuous roiling storm of obsidian-black Infinity interlaced with threads of something older, something that the Infinity was pressing against and through and around in the way that a river pressed against bedrock, moving around the edges of what it could not move through.

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify